OpenSourceFPGA Launches Foundation to Accelerate Adoption of Programmable Logic

As someone pretty integrated with open source hardware, this initiative weirds me out.

There's a growing community around open source silicon, whether that means ASICs with Openlane & the Skywater PDK or FPGAs with Symbiflow or more general cores with the FOSSi Foundation. But as far as I can tell, none of the folks on the board of OSFPGA are affiliated with any of that work with the exception of Brian Faith from QuickLogic (which uses Symbiflow as their first-party toolchain IIRC). Co-Chairman Naveed Sherwani lead SiFive for a while and started a bunch of companies/organizations with "Open" in the name (like OpenFive), but none of these are "open" in any open-source sense as far as I can tell.

Further, membership is expensive and representation on the "board" is determined by the amount of capital you have which feels antithetical to building an inclusive community where passionate individuals can contribute (and indeed, much of the OSS in this space is driven by insanely productive individuals like Claire Wolf & whitequark).

Finally, quoting from the press release:

> The Open Source FPGA Foundation offers a set of free and open source tools

But the github is empty except for a singular project that just links to work done before the formation of this entity?

So constructive feedback, if you're involved with this initiative, please reach out to one of the many communities that already exist:

- The Skywater Slack

- The Symbiflow Slack

- The YosysHQ Slack

- #openfpga & #symbiflow on freenode

- The 1BitSquared Discord

I do feel Intel if anybody could of pushed FPGA's into consumer space. Heck even if they added a basic small affair onto their chips as standard it would open up software and standards. See you need to software as much as the hardware to drive standards that get adopted as a standard that is not adopted is a swing thru the middle of the tree called a swing.

I hope this pans out well. After all, imagine if your OS could do a few custom instructions in a FPGA as an OS accelerator, offload some of the routines not already enshrined into a dedicated instruction.

I would also add, there is one avenue that may see this pan well, if you can do crytomining upon them - that would certainly be a blessing for all as would get them into mass production, shift the crypto's away from GPU's and much good would come from it. That's the optimistic hope how we will get some FPGA's into the standard CPU/SOC offerings in much the same way the FPU was a separate chip at one stage in CPU life.

The MiSTer FPGA project is bringing FPGAs to the attention of a whole lot of techie hobbyists. I know it’s got me thinking about learning a bit.

About 2 decades ago, the micro-controller world was extremely closed. If you needed an IDE, compiler or debug tool there was no choice besides ugly proprietary options. Then arduino happened.

Boards that support Symbiflow are the arduinos of FPGA.

next startup: hosted design entry and CI/CD for FPGA... Every time Vivado taskbars go back and forth forever I start writing a Javascript clone of the block designer and scripts to launch builds on AWS...